General's aide on leave over Web site

The California National Guard has placed on leave the personal assistant to its top general and started an investigation after questions were raised about a Web site he maintains that advocates mass violence.

"I, honestly, would like nothing more than to assist in the wholesale slaughter of every idiot on the face of the planet," Senior Airman Travis Gruber, of Sacramento, Calif., writes on the site, HowToKillPeople.com. In other postings and in a related blog, Gruber denigrates African Americans, Jews, Asians, women, gays and people with physical disabilities.

Until Wednesday, Gruber was the personal assistant and driver to Maj. Gen. William Wade, the Guard's commanding officer. The job, which Gruber had filled for more than a year, gave him access to the state's leaders, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he trashed in a posting that questions the governor's intelligence. Military law forbids soldiers from using "contemptuous words" about civilian leaders.

Gruber, who said on the Web site that he's 26, does not identify himself as a National Guard member nor does he mention Wade by name; he refers to his boss as "the big guy."

Gruber blogged that when ordered to drive "the big guy" to Oakland this year, he loaded a shotgun with extra shells and filled a pistol "to the brim with hollow-point" bullets because he feared entering the city unarmed.

In a separate posting, he wrote of a woman who once approached him with a question as he waited for Wade at the state Capitol and that he later regretted not "crushing her windpipe" and slamming his car door into her legs for bothering him.

After learning of the Web site Wednesday, the Guard placed Gruber on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation, said Lt. Col. Jon Siepmann, a spokesman.

Investigators will "look into the content of the Web site and make a determination into whether any of it is a violation of military law and regulations," Siepmann said.

Gruber, in a statement Siepmann issued, said he is "sorry if I have misrepresented or left a black mark on the California Military Department. I was under the impression that I was writing anonymously."

In the statement, he said he does not "condone acts of violence or aggression." He called his sense of humor "dark and distasteful."

Despite its name, the Web site contains no instructions on how to kill people. Rather, much of it is dedicated to social commentary, vulgar humor and sexual jokes. The site contains several pictures of Gruber holding what appear to be automatic weapons, including one of him pointing a gun at black people in tribal garb.